Fed up.
Every day there is a new story about the death of New York, how we are so broken that we can never be rebuilt. And every day brings a new crazy piece of news to a New York already on the verge of proving those people right. Our elected officials are crushing our city and state. Fed up.
A new rule, for example, bans events “where patrons buy tickets to see a performance,” Don Cazentre reported last week on Syracuse.com. “It seems like this week suddenly comes into play,” he said.
How can uploading a cover for music put us at risk for the coronavirus? Like any other dagger in the heart of small business, it does not. Fed up.
We can no longer live like this. The constant new rules, the constant dance to reopen. New York City has failed. Our governor and mayor keep us in a state of annoyance.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo says gyms can open; Mayor Bill de Blasio says no. Officials no longer keep us safe; they flex their muscles just to prove they are in leadership. Cuombos and the Blasio’s ghosts, perhaps entertaining in normal times, destroy us in the time of COVID.
The rest of the state has been eating for nearly two months now, but New York City has been stuck with tables in street parking lots. Restaurants and bars in the city that never sleep are forced to close at 11 p.m. However, the city’s infection rate, according to the Blasio, is 0.24 percent.
And Cuomo is threatening to close restaurants again in the fall. But NYC has not even opened yet! If we can not open restaurants now, we can never open them, and our city is dying. Fed up.
The real problem is limited fear of New Yorkers. Cuomo and the Blasio are destroying the dust of our city, and people are too scared of the virus to stop them.
During this crisis, we saw a division: One group, the pajama wearers, can work from home indefinitely and never leave their benches. They happily gather their checks and spend their time secretly in the satisfaction that they have handled this pandemic incorrectly. They bake bread, buy a Peloton bike and post Instagram photos of sun beaches from holiday homes. They are happy to listen to any backward guideline of elected officials. They do not suffer like their other New Yorkers.
The second group either worked through the lockdown or had sleepless nights wondering if their businesses would ever resume. They have to deal with ever-changing rules, ever-delayed opening dates and constant attacks on their existence. I’m a pajama wearer, but as a lifelong New Yorker, most of my world consists of people in the second group.
Many of these people currently compare their lives to living in a totalitarian regime, where rules do not make sense, but people are afraid to say so.
The East Village bar Lucky had withdrawn its liquor rights, according to the Eater website, after the owner began a petition “to reverse the state’s new mandate that bars should serve important amounts of food with every purchase of alcohol.” The bar at Village Line in Erie County mocked Cuomo with his menu items, and it too had suddenly taken away his liquor rights.
Speaking of which, your pain could be prolonged, and every business owner in New York knows it.
You do not have to think that coronavirus is a hoax – I do not – to see that these rules make no sense. But what they highlight, more than anything else, is that we are not all together.
Stop torturing small business owners with nonsensical regulation and unfair enforcement. Fed up.
The Blasio and Cuomo would like to celebrate how well New York handled the pandemic. Por favor. We did not cooperate and stayed inside for so long that our children might go to school, sometimes.
We did it to ‘flatten the curve’ and not overwhelm hospitals for a few months – but then to be able to go out to eat, listen to live music and have a drink with a friend.
We did it because we love New York and want it back.
We want our lives back, all of us – not just the pajama class.
If you love New York, you stand up for it now or do not be surprised that when you finally change out of pajamas and leave home, there will be no more New York to go back to.
@Karol
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